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Traffic Jams Around The World

Last month, a 100 Km (60 miles) long traffic jam was created on the Beijing-Tibet expressway. The jam had entered its10th day when reports first broke out on international media on April 23, 2010. The congestion which started on April 13 along the outskirts of Beijing was stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started.

Local authorities had to dispatch essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck as vehicles crawled along little more than a third of a mile a day. Fortunately, the jam seemed to have been cleared by August 25, according to a Yahoo report.

Other cities around the world face similar congestion headaches. The worst are in developing countries where the sudden rise of a car-buying middle class outpaces highway construction—unlike in the U.S., which had decades to develop transportation infrastructure to keep up with auto buyers.

A recent study by IBM suggested some of the worst commutes are in Moscow, where drivers reported 2½-hour delays, on average, when asked about the worst traffic jam they faced in three years. Still, Beijing beat out Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi to take top spot in the International Business Machines Corp. survey of "commuter pain,".

The 60 Km Beijing traffic was still not the record breaker. According to the Guinness Book of World Records those dubious records belong to France and Germany. The longest ever reported was that which stretched 109 miles northwards from Lyon towards Paris, France on February 16 1980

Here are some pictures of “almost” regular traffic condition occurring in different parts of the world.

Muslims returning home after a three-day religious festival in Raivinde - a small town in Punjab province, November 8, 2009. (Arif Ali / AFP / Getty Images)